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The procession began at the waterfront, winding its way through city streets. Candles cast shadows as light faded, footsteps trailing a horse-drawn hearse heard throughout the downtown core.

Five hundred people made the walk. Hundreds more gathered on the boardwalk and sidewalks, watching the team of Percherons — their driver dressed in period black — carry a single coffin.

One hundred years ago to the night since the mighty Titanic began its descent into the murky deeps of the North Atlantic, people from near and far gathered in Halifax, a city inextricably tied to the great ship’s dead.

They gathered to hear the story of sorrow — a tragic tale of technology, twisted and torn.

They gathered to commemorate compassion.

And to remember.

In a city that never forgot.

“It’s important for me to participate because I’ve been around water and the ocean all my life,” said Calvin Misner, a Dartmouth man who brought his children, 12-year-old Layton and Carley, 9, to walk the route with fellow cubs, scouts and girl guides.

“I wanted to come over to pay my respects.”

The walk ended at Halifax’s Grand Parade, home of St. Paul’s Church. Here, church bells rang out that first Sunday after Titanic’s loss, the very day CS Mackay-Bennett’s hardy crew of Halifax sailors began pulling in the first of the 328 bodies recovered from the icy ocean, some 1,300 kilometres away.

And before the night was over, the bells would once again toll, following a planned moment of silence and flares fired high to mark the stricken ship’s final calls for help.

The ceremony was unlike anything Sabine Haeckel, vacationing here from South Germany, could imagine. Her family, staying in Sherbrooke, made a special trip to HRM on Saturday just for the event.

“I don’t think they are doing anything like this in Europe,” she said.

“What we have seen is done well.”

The three-hour Night of The Bells event, to mark Halifax’s connection to the Titanic with music and song, was hosted by Gordon Pinsent and featured an audio-visual presentation by The Chronicle Herald, showing newspaper headlines of the day and vintage video of Titanic survivor Eva Hart, who died in 1996.

“The most dreadful sound of all is the sound of people drowning — the screams,” she said.

Twenty acts took to the stage to recreate the time, as the crowd was told, when “man and machine teamed up to conquer the land, sea and sky, making the once-thought impossible, possible.”

And nothing symbolized that age more than the largest moving object ever built — the Titanic, “a massive ship of dreams.”

The air was filled with the music of first-class passengers, ballads like Danny Boy, and the jigs and reels favoured by steerage passengers, as people on the Grand Parade bundled up and huddled closer in the chill.

Then came the accounts of the sinking — actors giving voice to awful remembrances of that night.

“I had just been lifted into the boat and was still standing when a foreigner rushed up to the side of the vessel. Holding out a bundle in his arms, he cried with tears running down his face, ‘Oh please, kind lady, won’t you save my little girl, my baby.’ Of course, I took the child,” said one.

And this from another: “The boat stood up like an enormous black finger against the sky. ..... I never heard such a continued chorus of utter despair and agony.”

“By 2:20 a.m., less than three hours after the bump, the frigid Atlantic swallowed the greatest, safest ship man had ever seen, taking with her more than 1,500 men, women and chidren,” Pinsent said, leading to the final act: the rescue of 705 survivors and the recovery of 328 dead, 119 of whom would be returned to the sea.

That Halifax should mark the centennial anniversary with such an event is exactly the right thing to do, said Glenn Stundon of Springfield.

Halifax, home of the recovery crews and ships, and the final resting place for 150 of the dead, should pay tribute to those who helped, he said, adding that both his father and grandfather were sailors in the Royal Canadian Navy.

“I think it hits home when anyone loses their life at sea,” he said.

“I just find it’s not about a movie. It’s about all the suffering.”

And that’s why it’s not right to think of the ceremony as a celebration, Stundon said.